Aug 7 2009

Atmail Launched

Atmail is a Linux based Webmail Client + Email solution that you can use as an alternative to Gmail or Exchange to bring your organization’s email under control. They came to us looking simply for ideas and nothing more. Perfect.

We have always had a soft spot for webmail and the thought of ideas being a deliverable was exciting. We spent some time brainstorming and then Steve’s eyes glazed over much like Isaac, the painter on Heroes, and he went to work. A few revisions later, we had something we were excited about and it was time to make sure it would actually work.

Since Steve did the design, I worked on the XHTML/CSS. I can promise you the implementation was anything but typical. Supporting IE6 is usually not much of an issue, as both of us have experience bending it to our will, but we did not have a lot of experience making web apps rendered with IE6 look and feel like a paned desktop app. A few expressions and some crazy css later, we had it working in all browsers and good to go.

We delivered the files to Atmail and hoped they were happy. Normally, we get feedback in the design process long before we implement the XHTML/CSS. Atmail was different though, as they just wanted to see what we would do without them. Talk about a cool client! Here’s what they had to say about our work.

I was impressed with the delivery and formatting of the HTML/CSS templates from Orderedlist – This enabled us to easily transform the mocks into jQuery and Zend, and get the prototype design into working code!

Evidently they were as happy as we were with the direction as they took it and ran with it. Last month, they launched version 6, which is our initial thoughts, brought to fruition by the their team. We were impressed at how well they took our 2 or 3 mockups and used them to create a cohesive app with a lot of functionality. Below is a screenshot of the final product.

Congrats on the launch Atmail, and we are glad we could help out!